It'll Be Orpheus Vs. Ives In Concert At Lafayette

Two bands, coming at each other from opposite directions, will collide in a cacophony of totalities and rhythms at Lafayette College in Easton on Wednesday night.

The chaos won't be from misguided alumni bandsmen who stayed too long at the College Hill Tavern, but from the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra playing the music of Charles Ives, arguably the most influential and erudite composer in American history.

"The reputation of Ives is sort of a collage," said William Purvis, an Orpheus horn player, describing Ives' famous band clash in "Three Places in New England," one of his most familiar and imaginative orchestral works.

It will take its place alongside other Ives' classics -- "Set No. 1 for Chamber Orchestra," "The Unanswered Question," Symphony No. 3 -- "The Camp Meeting," and "Set for Theater Orchestra." The program will be narrated by pianist Gilbert Kalish, an Ives scholar and advocate of 20th-century music. "People don't know this repertoire very well. There are only a few pieces that are widely known," Purvis said.

New York City's Orpheus, considered one of the foremost chamber orchestras in the world, is pursuing Ives as part of its recording project with Deutsche Grammophon.

The composer/insurance executive who died in 1954 exerted a lot of influence, but his enigmatic manuscripts -- which look like chicken scratchings -- continue to baffle the scholarly world. It almost seems deliberate, Purvis suggested.

"Ives maintained a fierce independence from the academic world," he said. "There is this kind of independent New England streak in him and that's in the music, too."

Purvis said scholarly psycho-biography also surrounds Ives, who first learned about polytonality, tone clusters and quartertones from his father, a Danbury, Conn., bandmaster.

"There was a contention for awhile that Ives went back to the pieces later -- basically being dishonest -- and added dissonances," he said. Another says Ives was a wonderful composer who really didn't know what he was doing -- "so you kind of have to fix things for him.

"These are the things facing the Orpheus," said Purvis during a rehearsal break last week, after Ives' frustrating polyrhythms derailed the conductor-less, self-governing orchestra several times before everybody got it right.

"Because none of us is a musicologist, we're looking at a lot of this material and getting advice from people who have gone back to the manuscripts. In the end, you just have to try and see how things sound."

In the Third Symphony, for example, the hymn tune "What A Friend We Have in Jesus" appears in various fractured ways. Ives later embellished it with shadow lines, dissonant voices that are tonally and rhythmically at odds with the rest of the piece.

He put them in and then took them out, Purvis said -- "what to do with them is a big question. We haven't decided yet."

But despite the riddling nature of his music, it's still an interesting experience for the listener, he added.

The Orpheus will perform "Set No. 1 for Chamber Orchestra," a group of vaudevillian songs he orchestrated around 1913. One of them, "A Lecture," has a noisy introduction evocative of college students reacting to a boring, stuffy professor.

"He was so innovative," Purvis said, adding that Bernstein, Copland and Elliott Carter built their careers on Ives' legacy. "There is a direct expression to this, even when what he is getting at is quite deep and difficult.

"This is not music to be afraid of ... except maybe for us," he chuckled, thinking about all the sound questions and atmosphere that Ives' music demands. "Listeners will find some of it extremely beautiful and touching. And they'll find some of it very funny -- there's such variety."

The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra will perform an all-Ives program at 8 p.m. Wednesday in the Williams Center for the Arts, Lafayette College, Easton. Tickets may be reserved by calling the box office at 250-5009. The box office is open noon-2 p.m., 4-5 p.m. and 30 minutes before ticketed performances.